All I can say is, I’m not trying to imply the opposite, that they have no fundamental problems. What I take issue with is sweeping proclamations. I know some things are broad some of the time, but I’d argue for something as serious as an assessment of a broad spectrum of parties across up to a century and numerous countries needs far more nuance and investigation than a couple of sentences worth of a vaguely applied principle. I made a specific point to emphasize “in this thread” because I don’t think your original thread was being reductionist; I think it was digging into detail more so, and I don’t expect academic paper length stuff on Lemmygrad just to have a discussion about these things. My criticism here was specifically about reducing it to the principle of “they haven’t tried or succeeded at a revolution.” I also think it’s worth nothing here, the meaning of “tried” may need clarity. If a party has never “tried” in the sense that it never even did anything in the direction of revolutionary work, I’d agree it’s a clear failure. But if “tried” only means “made a direct attempt on the state with force”, that’s a different meaning.

I know this kind of linguistics stuff can be annoying to some, so I get kind of self conscious at times about even calling attention to it, but nevertheless, I think it matters for something as weighty as an assessment of so many parties over such a long period of time. For example, some people can read “failure” and extrapolate from that as “throw the whole thing out, it has no value in it”, which is a different takeaway from “it’s intractable as a vehicle for forming a dictatorship of the proletariat, but might be useful in other ways.” Still others might read it as a moral thing, like “failure” is something to be taken personally or dismissively, as ignoring what else happened with it that could be considered beneficial in some regards but fell short of revolution, and that last one seems to be the cause of some contention in this thread.